Reality, as we live it, is not a fixed stage but a constructed experience. If we could see through the perceptual lens of a bat, an ant, or a whale, “reality” would take on entirely different contours. The difference is not only biological; it is perspectival. What appears in mind is never raw input. It is shaped inside a dynamic field of experience by what I call mental pre-contexts: the layered backgrounds—genetics and temperament, language and culture, values and beliefs, memories and bodily states—that quietly scaffold what becomes visible, audible, or even feelable to us. There is no perfect English equivalent for this concept; “mental pre-contexts” is the nearest working term. In this view, the mind is not an organ nor merely a by-product of neural activity. It is the active field in which experience arises. Sounds and images, thoughts and emotions, pain and meaning—all of these are the mind’s “content.” Some content is triggered from outside, like a siren or a beam of light. Some wells up from within the background itself: an anxiety without an external cause, a memory that surfaces uninvited. Change the background and the same content appears different, like the same handwriting rendered on blank paper versus graph paper. The hidden grid does not add ink, yet it reorganizes the writing. The brain is a prediction machine; it cannot predict in a vacuum. Mental pre-contexts supply the priors and the frames that make prediction possible. They form a nested matrix: mood, mother tongue, childhood templates, hormonal milieu, social learning. Each new experience lands on this living surface and is interpreted through it. The mind is not a passive receiver. It is a composer and an editor, continuously sorting, labeling, inferring, and sometimes creating content. Think of a camera viewfinder that overlays exposure, focus, and guides on top of a scene, or of augmented reality that blends the world with digital labels. Our minds do something analogous, only the overlays are not pixels. They are past experience, values, language, embodiment, and learned models. What we call “the external world” is never received untouched; it is routed through memory, inference, interoception, and the running hypotheses of a predictive brain. Experience is always world-plus-background. This is why even the simplest sentence—“It’s raining”—can be restful to one person and heavy to another. The weather is the same; the backgrounds are not. It is also why dreaming matters as an example. In sleep, sensory inputs fall silent, yet images, dialogues, pleasures, and pains still arise. Content can be generated by the system itself, out of its pre-contexts, which shows that the field of mind is not merely a mirror of the outside. Two complementary vantage points run through the book. From the third-person view, a human is a biological system: brain, neurons, body. From a wider social view, the same human is a node in institutions, nations, histories. Both are true and both are partial. The first-person view—the zero-distance point from which experience actually occurs—reveals something else: the body is not an external object but part of what appears in experience; thoughts and sensations arise within the same field. From here it is not obvious whether mind is inside body or body inside mind; the answer depends on which vantage point we are using. I use “mental pre-contexts” and “mental space” as modeling terms, not as claims about literal compartments in the brain. A mental model, in this book’s sense, is an abstract representation assembled by the brain to process, store, and retrieve information: images and colors, odors and tastes, sounds and movements, affects, pleasures and pains. These models are plastic. Remembering is not pulling a fixed file; it is reconstructing under the influence of current background, emotion, and new information. Neural pathways are strengthened, weakened, and reconfigured as experience accumulates. The background changes the brain, and the brain changes the background. The project is neurophilosophical in the literal sense: it asks philosophical questions with contemporary neuroscience at the table. It is critical of the limits of current scientific language—terms like belief, desire, suffering, or even consciousness are pragmatically indispensable yet often imprecise as explanations—while remaining committed to method, evidence, and clarity. Where everyday words fall short, I point to biological structure and computational framing without turning the text into a lab manual. The work appears in two volumes. Both begin with cognitive biases to show how perception is pre-formatted by the past. Volume I focuses on the inner architecture: perception, memory, mental models, self-awareness, agency, restraint, responsibility, feeling, solitude, anxiety, grief, death, and meaning. Family, gender, and identity are treated not as merely social constructs but as experiences with biological and historical depth. Volume II scales up to institutions and power: justice, rights, freedom, obedience, democracy and dictatorship, religion and other social systems, all re-read where individual minds meet shaping forces. You can read straight through, or dive into the deep end and circle back. Sources are cited at the end of each section for direct follow-up; technical terms are briefly explained where helpful without becoming prerequisites. I am trained in some of these domains and not in others. The commitment throughout is to intellectual honesty: to build on credible sources, to make the scaffolding visible, and to invite correction where I err. What this book ultimately proposes is simple and demanding: content has no meaning without background, and experience has no existence without a vantage point. To understand reality as we live it, we must study the backgrounds that make it appear. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wisdorise.substack.com
